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The deeper Ted Dykstra digs into himself, the more he finds … even if it isn’t always pretty.

It’s an interesting discovery to make as he enters his 50th year, but the multi-talented actor, director, musician and writer has seemingly struck pay dirt on a variety of occasions in his career, only to discover later on that a lot of it was fool’s gold, while the work that might have initially seemed less rewarding is where the real artistic treasure lies.

Take his current project, The Kreutzer Sonata, which he’s performing for the fifth time in recent years, starting on July 12. This time around, it’s being done for Soulpepper, where Dykstra has created some of his finest work in recent years. But before that, it began as two consecutive runs for The Art of Time Ensemble, before going on to Summerworks.

It’s a strange, poisonous work, based on a Tolstoy novella about a man who becomes so obsessed that his wife might be betraying him that he finally murders her in a jealous rage.

What made this work so distastefully compelling to watch in its various incarnations, is that one of the theatre world’s worst-kept secrets was that Dykstra’s two-decade marriage to singer Melanie Doane was dissolving as he kept recreating the pain on stage.

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I too wondered at his motives, until I had two very revealing conversations, six months apart, one with Doane, one with Dykstra.

These are sweet people who still love each other very much and are anxious to keep as much of their lives as private as possible, but they’re very clear about one thing: there were no betrayals involved on either side.

To discover that, I had to go all the way back to Chatham, Ontario where he was born in 1961.

“You have to understand where my parents came from,” says the still boyish Dykstra, tossing a mop of blond curls as he sits in the Soulpepper library.

“They were Dutch immigrants who came to Canada without even knowing the language. They had worked awfully hard all their lives. My Mom grew up in occupied Amsterdam, both her and my Dad had their youths wiped out by the war.

“They never had the chance to be young. They met in Chatham, one working on a bread delivery truck, the other picking beans. And then I was born.”

One instantly sees the difficulty of a young boy being to communicate, finding it much easier to hide secrets deep inside himself.

A few years later, Dykstra’s father got a job in Edmonton and he recalls driving through the Detroit race riots later immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s “Black Day In July”.

He shrugs. That’s just the kind of thing a kid remembers.”

But once he arrived in Edmonton, the possibility of performing began to open up, and he proudly recalls his first job with the “St. Albert on Sturgeon Players. The play was called Once Upon A Clothesline, I played the second bird and I stole the show.”

And anyone who’s ever seen Dykstra’s bravura work on stage is unlikely to doubt that statement.

He later cites his “breakthrough” performance in The Hobbit as what got him the most attention, but it was his appearance in Frank Moher’s TheBroken Globe that marked his first professional job.

“It was a very private world for me,” he recalls. “It was very far from everything that troubled me. The rest of the world became less important to me, because I was hanging out with adults who didn’t treat me like a kid.”

The rest of the years moved by quickly. He remembers seeing Derek Goldby’s production of A Respectable Wedding at the Shaw Festival in 1980 and it “simply blowing my mind.”

Then he got into the National Theatre School and he admits that a life pattern started which ultimately proved destructive to him.

“I got approval when I impressed people and I started to crave that approval, sometimes in the most inappropriate way. It became a substitute for love, for attention, for all those real things.”

He became Ted The Bad Boy, known for his outrageous theatrical performances in Fire! or in Stratford’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And along the way, while riding high, he met and married Melanie Doane.

“Everybody said to me, look at you, man, stardom, a great wife, you’re living the dream. And I’d want to say be careful what you wish for.”

The biggest leap into superstardom, of course, was the magical stage show called Two Pianos, Four Hands that Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt assembled from their childhood experiences as young pianists on the Kiwanis circle.

It opened in 1996 and played on 5 continents in 150 cities, with Dykstra and Greenblatt often travelling with it.

“But there’s an enormous toll that success brings,” he shares. “The price that you pay to go around the world for six years … the loneliness. I’d be in London, looking out my gorgeous apartment at my name in lights and I wanted to come home.”

So Dykstra did and started directing. Some of his work was great. But too often he’d settle for campy musicals and the annual Ross Petty Pant, work that left his colleagues frequently saying ‘Ted’s phoning it in again.”

And then, in what was probably a big mistake, in an attempt to relive his youth, he recreated the same part that had made him a star in Fire, 21 years later, bringing a whole world of inappropriate behaviour with it that caused him to crash and burn in a variety of ways.

“I looked around one night and said ‘Why am I carrying on the way I did 21 years ago? What am I doing with my life?’”

He went through some hard choices. His marriage ended. He started doing more good solid work and he’s currently putting himself through the crucible of The Kreutzer Sonata.

Why? Not because he’s settling any scores with any other people from his life.

It’s much more complicated than that.

You see, Ted Dykstra is finally learning how to forgive Ted Dykstra.

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